Back up Windows Settings

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I make regular complete backups, but what if I just want the settings (colors, fonts, etc.) without all the files?

Chuck Billow

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Do you mean colours and fonts used by Windows?

I don’t think these ‘user preferences’ are important to Microsoft… otherwise I suspect there would either be a built-in method to save/restore them or – as sometimes happened in the days before Satya Nadella’s shakeup of divisions – one of the Windows’ devs like Raymond Chen would tell us how to do it in a personal blog post (or The Scripting Guys would code it for us in VBS or PowerShell).

Anyway, if you mean Windows colours/fonts, most of these settings are stored per user in the registry below a Control Panel key.

For example:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\Colors
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics

The first two subkeys – Colors – look like they store Windows’ UI colours in RGB format.

The third subkey – WindowMetrics – stores the font used by the system for different elements, e.g. CaptionFont, IconFont, MenuFont, MessageFont, SmCaptionFont and StatusFont. (This data is stored as binary rather than string values but I can see that the defaults are SegoeUI font.)

However, not all font attributes are stored within this subkey. For example, the multiple settings for the font smoothing scheme in use are stored one subkey above, under Desktop.

As a result – and for practical ease of use – I would suggest saving/restoring the Colors and Desktop subkeys.

This can be accomplished manually easily by opening the Registry Editor, right-clicking on the Colors and Desktop subkeys and by exporting them to .REG files:

Restoring the settings would then be as simple as double-clicking on each .REG file and merging them. (Note: As this is working solely on the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry hive there’s no need to start the Registry Editor using Run as administrator.)

Is this what you want?

(You could automate this by a .BAT file or PowerShell script… but creating/testing, etc. seems a lot of work for something that takes seconds to do manually in the Registry Editor.)

Hope this helps…

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CWBillow

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Just what I wanted.  Thanks, Rick

Chuck Billow

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